complexion, even the valley and famous dimple of his chin. She had his smile. She even had the same mold and frame of his hand. But slender, young, and undeformed. Tall like him. Big-boned like him. Redheaded like him. She so resembled the troubled Father before me, you did not even have to ask her name.
She was the Presidentâs daughter.
The Daughter had eyes which were the perfect combination of the blue of her Fatherâs and the yellow of her Motherâs, producing a limpid emerald with tawny irises edged in gray. The preternaturally pale and milky skin hid a blush of penny copper which seemed to reflect a darker core under its translucency. Her nose was long like his, and narrow, but her mouth was just the opposite: generous, full, and wide, with an upper lip that was slightly fuller than the lower. Her high cheekbones pulled her eyes, bright withrunning away, upward toward temples that were stretched taut by a lavish coil of basket plaits the color of red corn. As I said, she was almost as tall as her father, with wide shoulders and a fine bosom, a waist that was no more than a hand span, and hands that were long, narrow, and had never seen hard work. She had a densely luminous, astoundingly compelling smile that seduced both men and women indiscriminately. But what was strange was an inexplicable and hypnotic charisma that hovered about her, wholly different from that of an ordinary young girl; it was an aura that surrounded the rich, famous, or notorious. It was as if Harriet, having been born at the height of the national scandal over her mother and fatherâs liaison, had absorbed with her motherâs milk all the sexual innuendos, lewd vibrations, and obscene accusations of that maelstrom of controversy. She exuded the faint perfume of transgressions that she had never committed and that had nothing to do with her, which, in the face of her innocence, gave her a provocativeness and an unnerving sexual duality that might have been explained away if she had been black, but she was white. Like demons the epithets of those awful days that had engulfed her mother and father, and us all, seemed to cling to her:
Black Asparia, Lower- World Nymph, Dusky Sally, Blackamoor, Monticellian Sally, Negro Wench, Sooty Sal, False Ethiop.
This innocent and sequestered girl trailed the shreds of secondhand celebrity like shrapnel clinging to a magnet.
Yet Harriet seemed completely unconscious of the effect this produced on men.
The President had stood framed by the low window out of which I could see the shady lawns of Monticello and, in the distance, his Blue Ridge Mountains, which the soft promise of summer had turned a deep mauve. The stillness in the room had seemed to echo the silence of the landscape before everything suddenly darkened with the rush of swift clouds passing across the sky. I heard a cough and then the palsied hand lifted as if in benediction as the good one shot out so abruptly that it was all I could do to restrain myself from falling to my knees in the old-fashioned obeisance of the ancien régime. He shook my hand.
His Excellency had changed. But hadnât we all? Thirty years was, after all, a long time. Thirty-five if one went back to the Paris of â87. My former master was now nearly eighty, his presidency fourteen years behind him, his ambassadorship more than thirty. Burrowed into the thin ascetic face were the lines of his uncommon destiny, blunted by the passage of time into an expression of benevolent sovereignty and self-entitlement. But I was notduped. No man is a hero to his valet, after all. The fifteen years that I had served the President in that capacity had made me an expert in discerning the rage and despondency that had brought on the pain he was trying to hide. He was angry with the woman standing beside her daughter outside in the hallway: the Mother who had stopped me outside the door and who had not changed from the first time I saw her in the drawing room of the
She was the Presidentâs daughter.
The Daughter had eyes which were the perfect combination of the blue of her Fatherâs and the yellow of her Motherâs, producing a limpid emerald with tawny irises edged in gray. The preternaturally pale and milky skin hid a blush of penny copper which seemed to reflect a darker core under its translucency. Her nose was long like his, and narrow, but her mouth was just the opposite: generous, full, and wide, with an upper lip that was slightly fuller than the lower. Her high cheekbones pulled her eyes, bright withrunning away, upward toward temples that were stretched taut by a lavish coil of basket plaits the color of red corn. As I said, she was almost as tall as her father, with wide shoulders and a fine bosom, a waist that was no more than a hand span, and hands that were long, narrow, and had never seen hard work. She had a densely luminous, astoundingly compelling smile that seduced both men and women indiscriminately. But what was strange was an inexplicable and hypnotic charisma that hovered about her, wholly different from that of an ordinary young girl; it was an aura that surrounded the rich, famous, or notorious. It was as if Harriet, having been born at the height of the national scandal over her mother and fatherâs liaison, had absorbed with her motherâs milk all the sexual innuendos, lewd vibrations, and obscene accusations of that maelstrom of controversy. She exuded the faint perfume of transgressions that she had never committed and that had nothing to do with her, which, in the face of her innocence, gave her a provocativeness and an unnerving sexual duality that might have been explained away if she had been black, but she was white. Like demons the epithets of those awful days that had engulfed her mother and father, and us all, seemed to cling to her:
Black Asparia, Lower- World Nymph, Dusky Sally, Blackamoor, Monticellian Sally, Negro Wench, Sooty Sal, False Ethiop.
This innocent and sequestered girl trailed the shreds of secondhand celebrity like shrapnel clinging to a magnet.
Yet Harriet seemed completely unconscious of the effect this produced on men.
The President had stood framed by the low window out of which I could see the shady lawns of Monticello and, in the distance, his Blue Ridge Mountains, which the soft promise of summer had turned a deep mauve. The stillness in the room had seemed to echo the silence of the landscape before everything suddenly darkened with the rush of swift clouds passing across the sky. I heard a cough and then the palsied hand lifted as if in benediction as the good one shot out so abruptly that it was all I could do to restrain myself from falling to my knees in the old-fashioned obeisance of the ancien régime. He shook my hand.
His Excellency had changed. But hadnât we all? Thirty years was, after all, a long time. Thirty-five if one went back to the Paris of â87. My former master was now nearly eighty, his presidency fourteen years behind him, his ambassadorship more than thirty. Burrowed into the thin ascetic face were the lines of his uncommon destiny, blunted by the passage of time into an expression of benevolent sovereignty and self-entitlement. But I was notduped. No man is a hero to his valet, after all. The fifteen years that I had served the President in that capacity had made me an expert in discerning the rage and despondency that had brought on the pain he was trying to hide. He was angry with the woman standing beside her daughter outside in the hallway: the Mother who had stopped me outside the door and who had not changed from the first time I saw her in the drawing room of the
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